Human civilisation has caused such a slaughter of biodiversity that it threatens to upend all life on the planet. Targeted conservation can help, but what’s needed is systemic societal change.

A major report published this week by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) highlighted a plummet in animal populations. Using data from the Living Planet Index (LPI), which tracks more than 4,000 species, it found an average decline of 60 per cent over the past 40 years. The alarming figure comes in the wake of similar reports.

What is to be done? The good news is that targeted conservation efforts can have an impact. There are encouraging signs that tiger populations, for example, have grown in India and almost doubled in Nepal amongst expanded wildlife reserves and an increase in the numbers of anti-poaching rangers. When it comes to combating hunters, there have also been efforts to use drones to police wildlife reserves in Kenya, and spatial monitoring technology to help anti-poacher patrols across sites in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

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In the oceans, protective legislation means humpback whales have risen from the brink of extinction during the height of whaling in the 19th and 20th centuries, to numbers of around 80,000 today. The green turtle remains endangered, but protection policies have been put in place to stem international trade of the animals, while turtle excluder devices have been introduced in fishing nets; a mechanism that allows larger animals to escape trawling.

“Another particular example of successful conservation is the Mauritius kestrel,” says Louise McRae, research associate at the Zoological Society of London. “It was the rarest bird in the world, at one point down to four individuals, but captive breeding meant the population could be boosted.”

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Breeding programmes, endangered species protections and technology to monitor and map populations can pull animals back from the brink. These are positive stories, and offer a glimmer of hope in the environmental gloom, but they are intensive efforts targeted at specific species. “The problem is, all this is crucial work, but it’s very much fighting a series of battles where the overall war is being lost,” says McRae. “We don’t get to restore the balance of global nature unless we address those key drivers behind animal population loss.”

Professor Claudio Sillero, conservation biologist at the University of Oxford, similarly argues that conservation efforts are encouraging, but there are root causes that need to be addressed: “Forest cover has increased in many nations, the proportion of the earth under some form of protection has also increased, rewilding and habitat restoration are becoming mainstream interventions, and financial efforts from philanthropists and multilateral efforts continue to increase. But in order to slow down biodiversity loss any further, and even revert it, some large scale impacts will have to be addressed.

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“Unless habitat destruction for agriculture commodities, extensive livestock grazing degrading habitat further, and the unsustainable demand for wildlife products in many countries are brought under control the future will be dire.”

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These issues run deep. What we’re talking about isn’t captive breeding for few endangered species, but systemic change on an unprecedented scale. Faced with that, it’s tempting to throw your hands in the air and accept defeat. A look at the unpromising futureu of the Amazon rainforest, or the Australian government’s recalcitrant commitment to coal, or China’s partial reversal of the ban on the trade of tiger bones and rhino horn doesn’t inspire confidence.

In its report, WWF calls for a global deal for nature to work alongside the Paris Agreement on climate change. In 2020 there will be a set of critical environmental meetings, including the UN Climate Change Conference and the meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity in Beijing. Now is the time for pressure to be put on world leaders to embrace new agreements on sustainable development, the organisation argues.

“We can’t wait until 2020 and hope something happens,” says Mike Barrett, executive director of science and conservation at WWF. “We need our leaders to step forward now. In the UK, we know the government is committed to a new environmental bill. The crucial thing is to make sure the action of the government matches the rhetoric. That bill will have to take the country’s trade deals into account, because the raw materials we import drive biodiversity loss in other countries.”

The WWF’s call-to-action joins an increasingly large chorus, but are those in power listening? The new grassroots group, Extinction Rebellion, has accused the UK government of willfully ignoring precautions and irresponsibly promoting rampant consumerism in the face of a worsening ecological crisis. Former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has joined close to 100 senior academics in backing the group, which is planning a campaign of peaceful mass civil disobedience.

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The WWF’s report uses very different language, but it too ultimately stresses the importance of encouraging politicians to look at the long-term health of the planet. Tigers in Nepal and kestrels in Mauritius are a hopeful sign that we can pull things back from the edge, but only if we realise we’re teetering above a ditch in the first place.

“We need to address the root causes before we can affect any change,” says the ZSL’s McRae. “While conservation does work, we don’t want to have to keep bringing populations back from the brink of extinction.”